Digg Rolls Out New User Profiles

Digg rolled out a new feature for its user profiles which is clinging towards transforming the social news site into a social networking site. Think of it as Pownce with user-submitted news feed minus the cool green background.

There are many things that Digg users can do with the new user profiles. They can add profile photos and other images, share favorites with “friends”, view what their friends are digging, add a short bio and links to blogs, messaging account and other relevant links, view digg activity stats, view recent activity in the Digg portal and lastly, a not so cool feature which I think shouldn’t have been included at all – the shout box. Why do I think that the shout is unnecessary? If Digg wants to transform its site into a full social networking site, it can survive without the shout box. There are other ways by which Digg users can communicate with each other. The shout box will just clutter the user profile page.

But anyway, the good thing about this new feature is that users can control who can view their profile with varying degrees of privacy. The bad thing about the new user profile is that users can not rearrange the profile components to suit their preferred format. Now that’s not very web 2.0-ish.

Kevin Rose encourages Digg users to read the new TOS and Privacy Policy which have been slight modified to reflect the new user profile feature. He also promises some more new features coming as Digg inches closer to becoming another social networking site.

Digg Images: A dedicated images section (with thumbnails). Still on track to launch in late October.

Revamped Comments: No more ajax loads, new clean and lightweight design (similar to the old comment system).

Digg Alerts: Alerts will give you the ability to create customized email alerts – when a story becomes popular, summaries of popular stories on specific topics, and when your friends recommend stories.

Story Suggest: Dozens of servers crunch the math to provide you with real-time recommendations (stories and friends) based on what you’ve dugg in the past.

Arnold Zafra writes daily on the announcements by Google, Ask.com, Yahoo & MSN along with how these announcements effect web publishers. He is currently building three niche blogs covering iPad News, Google Android Phones and E-Book Readers.